Footstep Sounds with FPS Character

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
1

Hey Everyone

Trying to figure out the best way to go about this. I have a character which is just the FPS arms and weapon and not a full body. I’m trying to get Footstep sounds to work.

Now I’ve tried using Anim Notifies by modifying the different relevant animations and this has worked really well except for one issue. I have several different weapons with reload animations. Now because the player can walk or run and reload at the same time, I have no anim notifications to fire off for footsteps as the reload animations don’t involve character movement and if i added anim notifies, then they would fire off even if player is standing still.

Method 2 is I tried to instead of using anim notifies, use basically the player location, and making sounds if the player has moved a certain distance from their current location (Step Size). This also works quite well and fixes issue in method one with reloading animations etc, except if player is walking or running and does a 180 without stopping there can be a delay before the sounds fire off again (i think this has to do with the location part of things). I got this method from the now free Horror Engine 2.0 asset.

I’m wondering if anyone has had similar issues and how they got around them or if they have implemented footstep sounds for a FPS character with no body a different way.

Thanks.

2

I just used the player velocity to decide whether to play a set of random samples on a timer. You can just make the timer interval shorter for running. It also deals with the 180 business.

3

I’ll look into that and see how it goes. Thanks.

Edit: So I tested it with the way you mentioned and yeah seems to be the way to go. Works very well. Fixes issues I had with the 2 methods I had already tried. Thanks again.

1 Like
4

Great :slight_smile:

What also really helps is randomizing the volume so that many of the footsteps almost don’t sound. Because in real life, nobody sounds like a horse clopping along. Something which a lot of game dev totaly miss…

5

Interesting. I will give that a try and see how it sounds. Never thought about that before so should be interesting to see how it turns out. Thanks.

6

I take it this is going to be a single player game. Otherwise you’d need to have a full body 3rd person mesh along with the arms. You’d then use the full mesh animation for the foot steps.

7

Yeah single player. The timer method seems to have solved all my issues. I looked at even adding a full body mesh along with the FPS arms but was much more effortless to just use the timer method since i don’t need a full body for anything else.